


Love and Promises

by savorvrymoment



Series: Broken Wings [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-14
Updated: 2015-12-14
Packaged: 2018-05-06 15:17:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5421848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/savorvrymoment/pseuds/savorvrymoment
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>~He almost can’t blame Gabriel for toying with them both for all those years, trying to pull the right strings enough to change things, if he’d seen all along that this would be his fate in the end. ~  Old one-shot moved from livejournal.  Written after Ep 5x19, in 2010.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love and Promises

They’ve been driving away from the Elysian Fields hotel for about five minutes, Kali grumbling away in the back seat the entire time, before the goddess suddenly goes silent, sitting up in her seat, back rigid. Sam’s immediately on edge, whirling around to look back at her, trying to figure out what is wrong. She stares back at him with wide eyes, eventually says, “He’s done it.”  
  
“Done what?” Dean snaps, in a bad mood already. A combination of having a goddess in the back seat of his Impala, and the effort of covering up the gut-wrenching fear he’d just experienced, Sam knows.  
  
Kali’s eyes flick to Dean, then back to meet Sam’s. “He’s killed the devil,” she says.  
  
Sam’s heart stutters in his chest. Dean almost loses control of the vehicle in his excitement. “Who?” Dean shouts. “Gabriel?!”  
  
“Yes,” Kali says, and her eyes are still wide as saucers. “He needs your help now,” she continues. “Go back for him, I’ll be fine from here.”  
  
Before Sam can open his mouth to ask for more information, for clarification, she’s gone. Just gone, disappeared into thin air. “What the…?” he mumbles.  
  
“Way to be cryptic,” Dean grumbles, but swings the car around in the middle of the road nonetheless. “I can’t even…” he continues to mumble, then looks over at Sam. “So what, he just wanders in there and ices the devil, just like that?”  
  
“I guess,” Sam says, and his heart is still playing staccato against his chest. “I mean, apparently…”  
  
Except, as it turns out, apparently not so easy as that. Apparently not as easily as just sauntering in and icing the son of a bitch. Apparently, not without almost getting himself killed in the process.  
  
~*~  
  
They stand outside of the little rundown motel and listen to the unearthly shrieks continue on from inside the room.  
  
“This is a load of horse shit,” Dean says, speaking loud to be heard over the noise. Sam’s ears are ringing from being inside the room when Gabriel had started screaming, and he’s surprised Dean didn’t lose his hearing considering he’d been hovering over the archangel. Even so, Sam can see a trail of blood leaking down from Dean’s right ear. Sam thinks this is probably a bad sign, but they have bigger fish to fry right now.  
  
“Yeah,” Sam calls back, watching as yet another occupant of the motel comes running out of their room in fear, stumbling across the parking lot and looking back at the motel as though it’s haunted.  
  
Sam remembers the way Gabriel looked when Sam had put him down on the bed, his wings filleted and oozing this gooey sort of blood, not human, and the angel’s eyes were blank. Hurt, afraid, almost uncaring at that point.  
  
If he dies, it’ll be Sam’s fault. It’s Sam’s fault for starting this whole mess, and if Sam hadn’t started it all in the first place, then Gabriel would’ve never had to face Lucifer.  
  
So really, Sam might as well have taken that knife to his wings himself.  
  
He finds himself praying quietly, silently, for the first time in years. Because even if God doesn’t think the apocalypse is His problem, and doesn’t think Sam and Dean are His problem, surely Gabriel is His problem?  
  
Gabriel, the archangel with six broken wings, who killed the devil.  
  
The noise inside the motel room rockets up against all logic, has Dean and Sam both wincing from outside, and the wall in front of them cracks right up the side. Sam sucks in a breath, shares a significant look with Dean, and then it’s suddenly quiet.  
  
Suddenly, deeply quiet.  
  
And Sam is sure that this means Gabriel’s died.  
  
He stares at Dean, who watches him with wide eyes. Sam fights the urge to cry.  
  
“Should we…?” Dean starts, but then the motel room door is slammed open, and Castiel steps out with Gabriel slung over his shoulder. They paint a grotesquely comical picture, Gabriel draped over Castiel like a sack of potatoes, his wings flung out everywhere, hitting Castiel in the face as Castiel tries to maneuver him.  
  
“Put him in the back of the car,” Castiel orders, marching toward the back of the Impala. “We need to leave here and go somewhere safe where he can rest. We’ve made a very big scene here.”  
  
“Yeah, you guys pretty much cleared out the motel,” Dean comments, scurrying to open the back door to the Impala. Sam hovers behind, watching as Castiel lies Gabriel out in the backseat on his stomach, his wings flopping everywhere.  
  
There are tendrils of black smoke swirling up from the ends of Gabriel’s wings, and Gabriel is very obviously unconscious. Sam didn’t even know angels could _be_ unconscious. “Is he okay?” Sam asks nervously, looking through the car window after the door has been shut behind Gabriel.  
  
“He will survive,” Castiel says smoothly, and Sam tries not to read into what isn’t said there.  
  
“We’ll go to Bobby’s,” Dean decides as he heads toward the driver’s seat. “I’m sure we’ll be welcome, and there’s plenty of room. And there the traps and the wards, and the panic room should we need it.”  
  
Sam nods, sliding into the passenger’s seat. He finds himself immediately looking to the back seat to where Gabriel is laid out. The angel’s face is turned toward Sam, and his eyes are closed, expression smoothed out now that’s he’s out cold.  
  
“I’ll accompany you. For Gabriel’s sake,” Castiel says as he slips through the side of the car and into the back seat. He settles in next to Gabriel, blue eyes watching his brother with concern.  
  
Sam stares at the tendrils of smoke for another long minute as Dean pulls out of the motel, before finally settling back down in his seat, closing his eyes, and trying to forget the way the archangel’s wings had looked bleeding.  
  
~*~  
  
Gabriel stays unconscious for what seems like forever.  
  
Castiel stands guard over him in Bobby’s upstairs bedroom waiting for him to wake up. Sam sits with Castiel often, watching Gabriel sleep, watching him shift his wings in his sleep every so often, waiting.  
  
He wants to know what happened. According to Castiel, the wounds were made by an angelic knife forged in the fires of hell, something that would have likely been wielded by Lucifer. He asks Castiel what the he’d done to Gabriel’s wings to make the wounds close and stop bleeding, but Castiel just shakes his head and turns away. Sam figures that maybe he doesn’t want to know.  
  
But Gabriel’s wings are still something otherworldly and astounding. They’re huge, or at least the ones on the right side of his body are. The ones on his left side are the worse for the wear, but the right ones are still mostly whole, just the ends clipped off crooked and ragged. He’s been keeping them at a comfortable folded angle while he sleeps—not tucked close to his body, but not sprawled all the way across the room either—and Sam can’t help but wonder what his wingspan would be. Huge, probably.  
  
And the color. Sam’s always sort of associated angels with white, fluffy wings, but Gabriel’s are a sleek, deep, iridescent black that catch the light and shimmer in colors.  
  
Sam reaches out and touches them once when Castiel is downstairs talking to Dean—he can’t help himself, the curiosity and amazement has been getting to him. He lays his hand the top, left wing, finds the feathers smooth as spun silk. The wing trembles a bit under his fingers, and he glances down at Gabriel to make sure he’s not disturbing the archangel.  
  
Gabriel sleeps on, though, so Sam lets his hand slip on down the wing to the broken crest, where the feathers have been burnt away and scar tissue is beginning to thicken. He can feel the shattered bone underneath his hand, and his heart breaks.  
  
Then, the wings are stretching, shaking, and Sam steps back, afraid he’d just done something. Because it figures that he would do something to hurt the poor son of a bitch now.  
  
Except, as he sits back down and eyes Gabriel with concern, Gabriel finally wakes up.  
  
~*~  
  
Castiel tells them that Gabriel will heal quickly once he’s awake. And true to word, Gabriel does.  
  
He’s back to his old rude, sarcastic, lewd self within a couple of days. He stocks Bobby’s fridge with beer, margarita mix, expensive wine, and champagne, and only smirks when Bobby suggests that they might need actual food eventually. He takes Castiel’s beige trench coat and hides it on a daily basis, much to Cas’s chagrin. And they all get used to occasional random half-naked woman walking by in the living room.  
  
Then Bobby’s wheelchair disappears one morning, and in the boys’ annoyed search around the house for it, Gabriel strolls by and calmly suggests that Bobby might not need it anymore. They all stare, awestruck, as Bobby stands up from the bed—fucking _stands up_ from the bed. Gabriel just grins at the three of them, busy chewing at piece of licorice, before disappearing back down the hall.  
  
Sam’s not sure what he’d been expecting. He somehow expects the world to change now that the apocalypse has been averted, but everything stays pretty much the same, maybe just a little quieter. Dean goes out on small hunt soon after they get back to Bobby’s, then doesn’t mention going back out ever again. They’ll end up back on the road eventually, Sam knows, but it’s nice to have the reprieve.  
  
As for Gabriel, he keeps his wings tucked away now that he can and is seemingly unconcerned by it all. Or at least, he doesn’t talk about it, hasn’t ever talked about that night that they found him outside of the Elysian Fields Hotel, about his wings, about killing the devil…  
  
His generic response whenever Lucifer’s death is brought up is, “Yeah, I’m just that awesome.”  
  
And maybe Sam should know—he’s been around his brother long enough to know what it looks like when someone is hiding a whole lot of crap under a small little coating of sugar—but it still catches him off guard when he finds Gabriel in the bathroom that night.  
  
At first, he thinks it’s Dean in there going through his things, and how many times has Sam told Dean to leave his crap alone? But he finds the archangel standing in front of the bathroom mirror, wings out and on display, raised and stretched and fluffed out as far as he can in the small bathroom. And this look on his face, aching and heartbroken, eclipsing everything else. Sam ends up breathing out the angel’s name without meaning to.  
  
Gabriel’s head snaps around to look at him, his wings fluttering around in agitation, and he starts rambling on about biblical prophecy and fulfilling destiny and how it doesn’t matter. _How it doesn’t matter…_  
  
Except there are tears tracking silently down Gabriel’s face, and Sam’s pretty damn certain it does matter.  
  
When Sam embraces him, holding him close and letting him cry into his chest, the thinks back to Gabriel years ago, positions reversed, Sam sobbing for Gabriel to just give him back his brother, and the way Gabriel had begrudgingly acquiesced.  
  
It hits him then like a ton of bricks…  
__  
“I’ve skipped ahead. Seen how this story ends…”  
  
He almost can’t blame Gabriel for toying with them both for all those years, trying to pull the right strings enough to change things, if he’d seen all along that this would be his fate in the end.  
  
~*~  
  
“Did he know this would happen to him?” Sam asks Castiel quietly the next morning. Sam tries to keep his voice down so Dean will stay out of it from where the man is making coffee, but Dean immediately turns his head over his shoulder, obviously listening. Gabriel’s out in the junk yard, and Sam would say the angel was brooding if it was anyone else.  
  
“You mean Gabriel?” Cas says easily. He has his trench coat this morning, which means Gabriel is definitely off of his game. “He has not said to me as much but…” Cas says, then frowns a bit. “I get the impression that he knew it would not end well for him.”  
  
Sam nods, humming to himself. Dean returns to the table juggling three cups of coffee and distributes them all out accordingly. Sam accepts his gratefully, giving his brother a smile, while Cas looks at his cup like it might eat him.  
  
“So, what, he knew he was going to get his wings ripped off but did it anyway?” Dean says, eyebrows raised. “Dude…”  
  
“He knew it was what he had to do,” Cas says, pointedly leaving his coffee alone.  
  
“That blows,” Dean says, shaking his head at Sam. Sam nods in horrible agreement.  
  
“Be kind to him,” Cas says after a moment of quiet. Sam’s a bit surprised by it, and he raises his eyebrows at Cas. “He may seem fine,” Cas continues, “but that sort of injury is not something an angel can just bounce back from.”  
  
He stares at Sam the entire time he says this, and Sam wonders if he knows something. Knows just how far Sam has taken this…  
  
Knows that Sam stood in the bathroom for an hour with Gabriel, a hand reached out to rest on one of the angel’s wings, and cried with him as Gabriel cried. Told Gabriel that it would be okay. Told Gabriel that he had saved them all, and Sam owed him his life, and the way he feels now, the sort of awestruck respect and amazement…  
  
He told Gabriel he was sorry, so sorry, over and over again, and stroked his hand down the angel’s wing until Gabriel silently tucked them away, pulled away from Sam, and left the room.  
  
~*~  
  
‘I’m too involved,’ Sam thinks vaguely as he’s sitting on the couch, Gabriel sprawled across his lap with his head thrown back over Sam’s shoulder, rocking his hips back and forth, back and forth. Sam curls his arm tighter around Gabriel’s stomach, pulls the angel even closer, groaning at the way it makes him shift deeper into Gabriel.  
  
He occurs to him suddenly that he is balls deep inside an archangel. A fucking _archangel_. He’s cracking up before he can stop himself.  
  
Gabriel squirms in his lap, his back sliding sweaty against Sam’s chest, and tilts his face to breath against the curve of Sam’s neck. “What’s so funny, kiddo?” he says, and his voice sounds like sex pouring out of his mouth.  
  
“I’m fucking an archangel,” Sam says, letting his hand run up from Gabriel’s belly, over his chest, playing with a nipple. Gabriel sighs, humming agreement. “Doesn’t that like,” Sam pauses, swallows, “Like, reserve me a ticket on the first train to hell?”  
  
“Noooo,” Gabriel drawls back, beginning to rock his hips against. Sam grunts. “That gets you a ticket on the first train to heaven,” Gabriel elaborates, voice breathy.  
  
Sam sighs around a chuckle, biting down on Gabriel’s shoulder, worrying at the skin between his teeth. Gabriel tips his head to the side a bit, allowing him more room, and rocks down on him a little harder. Sam moans into his skin.  
  
“Something like you?” Gabriel continues, sounding pretty far gone. “I’d like to keep that around to use at my disposal, if it’s all the same to you…”  
  
“Oh, so yeah? I’m just one big sex toy?” Sam says, mock-offended. Because, yeah, he’s got Gabriel’s number now…  
  
“When you’re hung like that, what do you expect?” Gabriel shoots back, but the hand he snakes up to rest against Sam’s cheek is soft and affectionate. He squirms a bit again before groaning low in his throat and grabbing a bit harder at Sam’s face, and says, “You’re—fuck—you’re right up against my— _fuck…_ ”  
  
And Sam can take the hint when it’s laid out like that. He loops his arm steady around Gabriel’s hips and starts thrusting up into him, resting his cheek against the angel’s as Gabriel tips his head back over Sam’s shoulder.  
  
It’s over way too soon, Gabriel coming in a burst of white hot light and somehow knocking over a whole stack of tomes that was stacked neatly next to the couch. Sam breathes heavily into Gabriel’s shoulder, his cock softening, and mumbles vaguely, “That was sort of intense…”  
  
Gabriel laughs, and says, “You get used to it.”  
  
~*~  
  
Sam does eventually get used to.  
  
Though he’s still not over Bobby wandering into his bedroom at ass o’clock in the morning to find out what that ‘Godawful blasted light’ was only to be greeted by two bare naked asses. However, Bobby seems to be over it, or at least ignoring it, so Sam tries to just move on.  
  
He goes to sleep every night with an archangel wrapped up in his arms, and he wakes up most mornings with an archangel still in his bed. Though some mornings Gabriel goes out and gets an early start on the trench coat hiding, naked girl making, and alcohol plying, so Sam won’t see him until he gets downstairs. Still, he usually wakes up with chocolate laid out on the bed next to him, or a smoothie set on the bedside table, or something equally absurd and romantic, and the first thing Sam does every morning is smile.  
  
Dean glares that morning when Sam comes down from his bedroom with his third smoothie that week. “How come he always makes you nice stuff, yet all he can do for the rest of us is stuff the fridge with chocolate so nothing else will fit,” he gripes as Sam sits down.  
  
Sam shrugs, still feeling sated and well-fucked from the night before and not really having the gumption to care.  
  
“I am sure there is chocolate in that, too,” Castiel speaks up from where he is sitting at the table as well, trench coat conspicuously missing.  
  
Sam glances down at the smoothie, contemplating, then nods. Castiel gestures vaguely in a ‘see, told you so’ sort of gesture.  
  
Dean rolls his eyes.  
  
“It’s normal behavior, considering he has selected Sam,” Castiel comments.  
  
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Dean asks, and Sam finds himself intrigued as well.  
  
“He is simply trying to please his other half—Sam—in all means possible,” Cas says. “You humans make relationships so difficult. Angels are simple. We just look to make our other happy.”  
  
Sam blinks, wondering where Gabriel is that he’s not wandering around here pulling pigtails and the like.  
  
“He doesn’t have to do that,” Sam says. “I’m plenty happy with just having him.”  
  
Cas shakes his head, says, “You don’t understand. He would not be happy if he were not doing these things.”  
  
“You all are so weird,” Dean says, shaking his head.  
  
And all Sam can think is just how in love he is.  
  
~*~  
  
“Cas says you’re wooing me,” Sam says that night, gently tracing his fingers up and down Gabriel’s back.  
  
The angel’s laid out on his stomach, eyes at half-mast, and he chuckles at Sam. “And how’d the little fly boy come up with that?” he asks.  
  
“Says all of this—you doting on me—says it’s like the angel mating call or whatever,” Sam says.  
  
Gabriel smiles in a way that alerts Sam that he’s pretty much right on. “It’s just what we do,” he says quietly, shivering gently under Sam’s fingertips.  
  
“Said you wanted to please me. Make me happy,” Sam comments idly.  
  
Gabriel hums agreement.  
  
“You know what would make me really happy?” Sam says, watching as Gabriel cracks an eye open to regard him warily, almost as if he knows already where this is going. Sam takes a breath, steels himself, says, “I’d love to see your wings again.”  
  
Gabriel sighs, closing his eyes again. “Sam…” he sighs quietly, a little broken.  
  
“Please, Gabriel,” Sam says, just as quietly. And it’s silent then for a moment, deathly quiet, then Sam says, “You don’t have to hide from me…”  
  
Gabriel doesn’t answer, and it’s silent and still for long enough that Sam’s sure Gabriel is mad and not going to do it. But then there’s a rush of air, and the wings materialize from his back and into the air. Sam’s breath catches in his throat as the wings extend over his own body where he’s lying on the bed, and he reaches up slowly, softly to touch one.  
  
They’re as soft as he remembers, that beautiful shimmering black, though this time the wing responds to his touch. It bends, gentle and graceful and alive, as he presses his fingers into it, and he looks over at Gabriel to find the angel’s eyes squeezed shut.  
  
“Gabriel,” he murmurs softly, but doesn’t get a response. He sighs dejectedly, but goes back to the wing, lets his fingers glide through the feathers on the underside. “They’re beautiful. Powerful,” he mumbles, aware that he might sound like an idiot, but not caring.  
  
He keeps stroking his fingers through the feathers, relishing in the silky feeling on his fingertips, and he doesn’t know how long he’s been lying there doing that when the wing gently lowers to lie across his body. It’s so huge, it covers him from knee to chest, and he looks over at Gabriel, startled to find the angel looking back at him with lovedrunk eyes.  
  
“Gabriel?” he asks quietly, raising his hand back up to run his fingers along the scar tissue at the end of the wing. Gabriel is staring at him as though he wants to roll over and eat him.  
  
“We usually don’t let people just lie there and molest our wings,” Gabriel comments nonchalantly.  
  
Sam thinks maybe he gets it. “Does it feel good?” he asks quietly, feeling his voice going hoarse.  
  
But Gabriel shakes his head. “Not sexual, not really,” he answers. “But it’s sort of beyond the definition of intimate.”  
  
“Oh,” Sam says, finds himself closing his hand on the crest. “Do you want me to stop?”  
  
“No,” Gabriel says quite plainly. “Keep touching me.”  
  
“Okay,” Sam says, and obediently goes back to stroking the feathers when Gabriel lifts his wing off of his chest.  
  
Gabriel sighs deep, mumbles something about love and promises.  
  
Sam closes his eyes and holds on to forever. 


End file.
